Wednesday, September 30, 2009

First of all, I need to make an official announcement as I have not done that yet on our blog. Many of you know but some do not. We are adopting one more child. Grace Nadja Maples turns 2 on Dec 1st and was born with a cleft palate and an extra 21st chromosome....aka...Down syndrome. She is in Eastern Europe and we hope to travel right after Thanksgiving to bring her home. My prayer is to celebrate her 2nd birthday WITH her. We are very excited and so are the kids. Please, if you are against us doing this, you're entitled to your opinion of our family, we ask that you please keep any negative comments to yourself. We've heard it all already, trust me. Thankfully we do have some wonderful friends that "get it" and are very supportive. We feel that this is 100% what God has asked us to do and while it won't be easy, it will be worth everything we will endure with not only 5 children but 2 of them having cleft palates and global delays. So now that we've said this "outloud" to everyone, I want to try to blog everyday this month. I make no guarantees but I've been so horrible about blogging that I'm going to give it my best effort. If you, my readers, have any questions for me, please ask and i can blog about those. Whether it be adoption in general, cleft palates, Down syndrome, what we're thinking, whatever, I'll blog about it. Some days I may just post a picture. October is National Down Syndrome Awareness month and we're learning all we can about raising a child with Ds. I also have a couple giveaways in mind that will be geared towards families that have a child with Ds or may be carrying a child with Ds. One item is a framed picture and a 2nd giveaway will be a literature package of several great resource books. Here is a little treat. A sweet picture just taken of our little Grace. Isn't she beautiful???